There Are Three Sides In The Looming Climate Change War

Whether they call it global warming, climate change or even
global cooling, more and more Americans are taking a stand on one
side or the other of this hotly debated issue.

According to
a survey published
last year by the Yale
Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason
University Center for Climate Change Communication, 66 percent of
Americans believe that global warming is happening, with 42
percent concerned that it will harm people in the United States
between now and the next 10 years. Forty-five percent of
Americans believe the country will be harmed by global warming in
the next 50 years, with only 16 percent saying that global
warming will never harm the U.S.

The arguments on either side of the issue can be broken into
three main categories. Those who do not believe in climate
change, or at least in man-made climate change, are considered
"climate skeptics." Groups concerned about climate change are
primarily split between two camps; those who want to prevent
further change and those who want to adapt to changes that do
occur.

Those who seek to prevent further climate change, such
as The Climate
Group, an international non-profit, believe that slowing
climate change will help the economy, workforces and improve
overall qualities of life. Climate-conscious groups see climate
change as a threat to global ways of life, with predictions that
weather extremes will be more common, ecosystems will be
challenged and ice melt will cause sea-level rise that will lead
to flooding. Many of the issues that are cited as causes for
global warming, such as an increase in greenhouse gases, also
have adverse health effects on people living in polluted areas.

How do these groups see these issues being prevented?

"One of the best things we could do to help prevent climate
change is simply to put all types of energy on a level playing
field," said Amy Davidsen, The Climate Group's Executive director
in the United States. "Currently, fossil fuels have access to
more financing and more government subsidies than cleaner forms
of energy. So for starters, allowing clean energy access to the
same financing options and eliminating unnecessary fossil fuel
subsidies, would really help clean energy to compete and grow the
way it needs it to in order to significantly reduce carbon
emissions."

Davidsen also suggest a measure that is often at the heart of
climate controversy: taxation.

"We can put a price on carbon emissions, for example, through a
carbon tax or carbon market. That would correct a failure in the
market that we currently ignore, namely the harmful impact that
carbon emissions have on people's health and the climate. We all
pay a real cost for this in the form of illness and extreme
weather, and pricing carbon would simply make that cost more
transparent, so that the market can make better decisions about
the types of energy it wants to have going forward."

Those in favor of climate adaptation paint a different picture.
Michael Cote, a climate change consultant specializing in climate
adaptation, environmental law and urban planning, focuses his
work on creating real-time solutions to problems that he believes
climate change causes. For example, he works on creating levees
for areas that may be more susceptible to flooding and rising
water levels.

Cote states that he does not think efforts to curb climate change
will be effective in preventing it.

"There are billions of people on the planet, and the population
is just going to increase," he said. "It will take hundreds of
years to curb carbon emissions, and all reports say that [carbon
levels] are just going up. It's not realistic to 'cure' it."

Instead, he feels that the best protection against the effects of
climate change is to prepare for the way the changes will impact
us.

Davidsen disagrees, stating that it would be more cost-effective
to prevent climate change in the first place.

"Over the past two years alone, the U.S. government spent $136
billion responding to extreme weather disasters, which are
expected to become worse and more frequent as the climate
continues to change, " she said. "That's much more than most
people realize, and the truth is that, as a country, we don't
have a very good handle at all on what this is already costing us
and is likely to cost us in the future. On the other hand,
investing that same amount in clean energy would have almost
tripled our total (public and private) clean energy investments
over the same period, creating a lot of good new jobs in the
process."

Cote believes the issue is more political than scientific, in
large part due to some of these regulatory plans. Government
intervention and raised taxes are highly contested issues for
many people. When taxes are imposed to prevent climate change, it
creates a situation that many people want to fight against. For
some climate skeptics, that includes fighting against the actual
concept and science of climate change to argue that the taxes and
regulations aren't necessary. Cote himself states that he's "just
not interested in tax raisers."

Another side of the issue Cote factors in is the way science and
the way information is shared has changed.

"There has been a shift in science education over the past 20 or
so years," he said. "Scientists, policy makers, the public and
the media need to work together. Compare this to the popular
image of the lone scientist in the lab - an image that still
lingers in the public mind. Science has changed and is trying to
be more responsive to the public. So, there is this transition
from one model of 'serving science on a plate' to 'everyone come
join us in the kitchen.' Fights are bound to burst when there is
no agreement on how to proceed."

"For an actual conversation, we need to meet in the middle," he
said. "People don't want the government to increase taxes, and
that shifts the conversation. It gets derailed."

For many anti-climate change groups, the focus on limiting
government intervention is a high priority. One such group is the
Heartland Institute, an organization that The
Economistcalled "the
world's most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about
man-made climate change." One of their biggest environmental
focuses is a petition to reign in the Environmental Protection
Agency, calling it a "rogue agency." They would like to see the
EPA's budget cut by 80 percent or more and have many of their
tasks relegated to local and state governments instead. They have
a petition going to try to convince Congress to repeal the
agency's authority to regulate carbon dioxide. On
their website (The
Heartland Institute did not respond to requests for further
comments), they call carbon taxes "job killers."

In their efforts to curb government intervention in environmental
issues, they criticize the science behind climate change. Among
their claims, they state that Arctic sea ice is rebounding,
Antarctic ice is expanding, polar bears are thriving and that sea
levels are not rising.

Each side has scientists claiming contradictory evidence. Some
polar bear experts claim numbers are safe, such as University of
Iceland professor and geologist Dr. Olafur Ingolfsson. Ingolfsson
believes that evidence
of an ancient polar bear jaw proves polar bears have
already survived an interglacial period. If that were the case,
Ingolfsson suggests current warming may not need to be a worry
for polar bear populations. Dr. Mitch Taylor, one of the
most-quoted sources in the argument for steady polar bear
populations, told the
Frontier Centre for Public Policy that data he has seen does not
appear to prove polar bears as a species are threatened or that
their populations are in decline. He does, however, say that
"some populations do seem to be experiencing deleterious effects
from climate change."

Meanwhile, the Species Survival Commission of the International
Union for Conservation of Nature released a study showing
that in areas where sufficient data was present, one species/area
has an increasing population, while eight have decreasing
populations.

IUCN's data on
polar bear populations.

While the Heartland Institute claims Antarctic ice is increasing,
the Copenhagen
Diagnosis, a climate science report comprised of the works of
several leading climate scientists, used severaldifferent
measurement techniques to create this graph of their
research results, showing a decline in Antarctic ice sheets.

Antarctic sea
ice levels recorded in the Copenhagen Diagnosis

John
Cook, the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change
Institute at the University of Queensland, explains that part of
the discrepancies in the argument comes from where
the focus of the claims is being placed. Satellite data
shows Antarctica's land ice mass is decreasing at accelerated
rates. Sea ice, however, is expanding. He also emphasizes the way
this information is interpreted during climate debates. Climate
skeptics, for example, argue that growing Antarctic ice is
evidence of cooling waters. Yet studies have shown that the South
Ocean is actually warming, more rapidly than all other oceans on
Earth. Decreased ozone layers over Antarctica, causing
stratospheric cooling that leads to ice-pushing winds, as well as
changes in ocean circulation, which can move warmer, saltier
water closer to the surface and increase melting, could count for
the changes in ice levels.

Cook summarizes, "Antarctic sea ice is a complex and unique
phenomenon. The simplistic interpretation that it must be cooling
around Antarctica is decidedly not the case. Warming is happening
- how it affects specific regions is complicated."

Cook himself is not a climate scientist but rather studies
peer-reviewed scientific papers. Among
these peer-reviewed papers on climate science, none
disagreed with the consensus that human activities are modifying
the atmosphere, and that greenhouse gases are likely the cause of
observed warming over the past 50 years. Organizations including
the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the American
Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union have
made similar claims, or at least support the evidence linking
human activity to climate change.

However, climate skeptics continue to state that there is no
scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, or that
human activity is contributing to it, often citing
a petition signed
by over 31,000 American scientists urging that global warming
does not exist. The argument is then made by the other side that
many of these scientists are not climate experts or that climate
change is not their field of study.

Climate scientists argue that climate-skeptic science merely
pulls examples from the "bigger picture" of a warming world to
support claims that temperatures are not rising, or for those
that admit the planet is indeed warming, that man cannot affect
the climate one way or the other. All aspects of climate
arguments essentially boil down to two groups viewing the same
data and pulling different conclusions from it.

For example, it is widely agreed upon on both sides that climate
change has been a natural part of Earth's history, even before
humans existed. Climate skeptics use this as evidence that human
activity is not affecting the current warming that
is occurring. Arguments have also been made that the warming
period we've had is just part of a natural Earth cycle and
nothing we can do will make it warmer or cooler. Yet
the data
that shows past climate changes have shown that
environmental factors have contributed to the change in the
planet's temperatures. Ice cores show that ancient changes in
carbon dioxide and methane related to melt levels. If that is the
case, then humans would be able to impact the environment by
increasing carbon levels in the atmosphere.

Climate change in America has become a highly politicized topic
between liberals and conservatives. Like many issues the two
groups face off over, a compromise may be hard to come by.
However, as Canada, Japan,
the European
Union and other developed
countries enforce climate adaptation into their
policies, it may be harder and harder for the United States to
stave off widespread changes.